Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Pursuant to order, I present the report of the Community Affairs References Committee on out-of-home care, together with the Hansard record of proceedings and documents presented to the committee.

Ordered that the report be printed.

I move:

That the Senate take note of this report.

This report is a very comprehensive report on the committee's inquiry into out-of-home care. We make 39 recommendations, which I will come back to shortly, on areas that need improvement in out-of-home care.

In 2013, the first report to the Australian parliament by the National Children's Commissioner highlighted serious concerns about Australia's out-of-home care system, particularly with the significant increase in the number of children placed in out-of-home care, including disproportionate numbers of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children. This committee inquiry certainly found that to be evident.

We also found the numbers going into out-of-home care very significantly troubling. There were, at 30 June 2014, 43,009 children in out-of-home care. What we found was that, over the past 15 years, the number of children and young people entering and remaining in statutory out-of-home care has more than doubled, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are almost 10 times more likely to be placed in out-of-home care than their peers. This is significantly troubling to the committee.

I would like to quote from Associate Professor Mendes, who gave evidence to the committee. He said:

If we as a community are going to give our government the power to coercively intervene in families where alleged significant abuse or neglect has occurred, then our government has both the moral and legal obligation to devote sufficient resources to ensure that the outcomes for those children are far better than if they had remained with their family of origin.

The committee recognises that parents have a responsibility to provide nurturing homes for their children, safe from abuse and neglect. The committee is, however, deeply concerned by the increasing number of children entering and remaining longer in out-of-home care. The committee recognises in our report that there are significant challenges facing Australia's out-of-home care system and that addressing these issues means addressing a range of complex and interrelated social issues linked to social disadvantage, including family violence, drug and alcohol abuse and mental health services.

We find that there are certain systemic factors that contribute to the high number of children entering and remaining in out-of-home care. In particular, the lack of family support services means there is limited scope for at-risk parents to get the support they need to build safe and resilient families for their children. The lack of available supports and understanding of the specific needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families and families with disabilities also contributes to an overrepresentation of these groups in out-of-home care.

Australia currently has in place a National Framework for Protecting Australia's Children. It started in 2009 and goes through to 2020. The committee is greatly disturbed by the fact that we have yet to see the outcomes from the significant work that has gone into the establishment of this framework. There is a third action plan to be developed by the states, territories and Commonwealth for the implementation of the national framework, and many of our recommendations go to the fact that this action plan is being developed, and we make a series of recommendations for attention in the action plan.

When we are talking about the number of Aboriginal children in care, Aboriginal children make up less than five per cent of our population yet across Australia they make up 35 per cent of the total number of children in care. In the Northern Territory and in my home state of Western Australia this is far higher. In WA this is just over 50 per cent, and in the Northern Territory it is even higher than that.

The cost of the abuse and neglect of children, when you take into account the cost of out-of-home care, has been calculated as $6 billion. The cost of out-of-home care itself is $2.2 billion for the 2013-14 financial year. Many witnesses said that clearly we should investing those resources up-front in supporting families, before children come to the point of having to enter out-of-home care. Witnesses talked to the inquiry of a system in crisis, broken and crisis-driven. They talked about a number of issues, and I will very quickly touch on them because I want to leave time for the rest of the committee members to comment.

The issues that we address in our recommendations address the need for data—how could community affairs ever have a report without talking about the issues around making sure we have good datasets? We talk about the need for independent child commissioners and guardians. We talk about a process for complaints for young people. We talk particularly about the need for the voices of young people in decision making for out-of-home care. We talk about the need for addressing the issues around transition when young people are leaving out-of-home care.

An important point—and it relates directly to that—is that the evidence suggests, from what we heard in the committee, that young people that have been in out-of-home care are having poorer life outcomes than children that have not been in out-of-home care. This also directly relates to transition age. Young people in out-of-home care are expected to leave their place of care at the age of 18. Not all of the evidence but most of the evidence pointed out that that was far too young, so we talk about the issues of transition and also suggest that states and territories should consider a transition age of at least 21.

We made some recommendations specifically aimed at Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and people with disability, some recommendations about permanency planning and about documentation. There are issues even around people coming into out-of-home care and young people being able to access documentation. We talk about better health outcomes, better education outcomes—all of which are poorer for those living in out-of-home care. The clear messages that I took from this inquiry were the importance of listening to the voice of young people and including them in decision making, and the importance of supporting parents who are at risk of losing their children and making sure their voices are heard in this process.

Before I conclude my comments, I would like to thank all of the witnesses who provided written submissions and who gave oral evidence to this inquiry. In many instances, it was pretty tough going. I particularly want to thank the young people who appeared before our committee. I think it was very courageous of them to come to the committee and tell us their accounts of their lives in out-of-home care.

I would also like to express the committee's thanks to the secretariat, who provided so much support for this inquiry. We had a lot of submissions and a lot of evidence and the secretariat provided the committee with an excellent report and with excellent support.

I would like to thank the committee members of the Community Affairs References Committee. We get tough inquiries and I think that that we provide here a set of recommendations that will help address some of the issues that we talked about in this inquiry. There are 39 recommendations. I urge Senators and the government to review those recommendations.